Room and Equipment handling using MS-Exchange Resource Mailboxes: Sharing Resource Calendars with Students in Outlook Live. A running log

Our users can view the free/busy information of our Resource mailboxes in the Scheduling Assistant of their Meeting request – and also, though even less convenient and more limiting, in the GAL.

This includes student accounts (hosted) being able to view resource mailboxes (on premise) free/busy – which seems the default, different from the solution to achieve this here – or are resource mailboxes permissions more liberal than regular mailboxes?

To allow users the more convenient access to the calendar of the resources (without being able to book through this interface), we have used this:

Based on this, we have successfully tested sharing our resource calendars with staff accounts (which are on premises).

We have been hoping to share calendars of our resources also with our student user accounts (which are hosted). However, “Default” in the above does not seem to include these. When students use the built-in “Add Calendar”feature from their Outlook Live/NINERMAIL, they receive a permission error: “The calendar for the mailbox you chose can’t be opened. You may not have permission to open this calendar”.

Student staff cannot view the resource calendars.A limited workaround could be to share calendars with individual student staff, so that they can display these calendars to walk-up clients. However, we cannot even share such resource calendars manually with individual students. While, when impersonating the resource, I can send out an invitation email to student staff, the student again gets an error when clicking the “Add calendar” link in the invitation mail: “This folder could not be opened. you might not have permission to open it, or it might not exist anymore”.

We also cannot see our student staff’s busy time, even if this busy times when working for us: “No information (Error code: undefined”):

A similar issue elsewhere seems to have been addressed successfully by addingfederation for

Another workaround could be to add calendar internet publishing privileges to individual resource mailboxes and sharing calendars with student staff, having them display these to walk-up clients.

What data gets published needs to be careful considered. However, it should be possible to hide personal information and just display usage of resources, using the built-in sharing levels (note that organizer may have been put in subject by Resourcebookingasssistant configured with AddOrganizerToSubject, so subject should not be included for calendars “LRCAssistant” and “LRCTutor”## which are offices held/resources booked by students):

Setting the permissions on the non_ipm_subtree\freebusy data only worked AFTER we enabled the resource and opened it in Outlook. Once the account was initialized, we were able to set the appropriate permissions. Even opening in OWA didn’t work..